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Pet Management – A very early Windows 3.1 program

Now, I’ve always loved having fish as long as I remember. Still have fish 🙂 Ok, this isn’t really about a fish, but rather a coding exercise (in the 90s) while I was splashing around in Windows coding (pun intended).

The idea is simple: You have a character (Goldfish in this example), and you have parameters that affect it: Temp, H20, filter, food etc. The user will adjust them as they wish. The flexibility in this charming little program was the following:
– User can adjust the time-scale (real-time to actual clock time ratio)
– User can pause and resume anytime without penalty
– Program will save the “state” of the program on Exit and will pick up exactly where user left off last time they played.

Simple little perks I thought at the time to add in and try to implement. So here it is, still running with my cute little drawing animation done in MSPAINT back in the day—nothing fancy although adding 3D fish animation/video would be the same coding effort for me; but my focus wasn’t on that as this was for my own learning.

This was coded in C/C++ using MFC framework.

Still runs like a champ on Windows 10.

I think going over the concept and code would be a great educational material for STEM students or anyone wanting to learn programming.

If you’re interested in getting the .EXE or the source, you may contact me. Cheers!

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